Malika Qafisha, 38, a mother of six, lives near the Ibrahami mosque in Hebron, which is holy for Jews and Muslims. Jewish settlers have occupied many Palestinian homes, and Qafisha and her family face daily harassment, in which settlers are backed by Israeli armed forces who shoot at Palestinian homes.
Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations tells that story of how from 1979 to 1983 very senior Israeli officials conducted a large-scale campaign of car-bombings that killed hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians. While the book has received the highest praise from reviewers, this secret operation has not been mentioned once. Remi Brulin writes this is a perfect illustration of the political discourse on “terrorism”: “The secret car-bombing operation Israeli officials conducted in Lebanon in the early 1980s represents a remarkable historical example of such ‘silences,’ and of the ‘rules’ that underlie the discourse on ‘terrorism’ and ensure that certain things simply ‘cannot be said,’ certain facts simply aren’t ever mentioned.”
The mainstream media’s obsession with the “fake news” story of the 2016 election is itself fake news. We’ve never had more good information than we have now; people are as well-informed as they want to be. There have always been outlets purveying lies. And the insistence on the story is an effort to assign Trump’s victory not to those who brought it to us (the electorate, and Hillary Clinton) but on some nefarious agents.
On December 10, 2017, 17-year-old Abdul-Khaliq Burnat was on his way to buy pizza from a neighboring village, when Israeli armed soldiers ambushed the car that he and his two friends were travelling in. He has now been sentenced to serve 19 months in Ofer Military Prison for stone throwing and cutting the fence at the illegally built separation wall on his village’s land. In addition, the court decided that Abdul-Khaliq’s family must pay a fine of 18,000 NIS (around $5,100). The family is now raising funds to pay this large fine.
Anas Shawqi Abu ‘Asser, 19, from Gaza city, was shot in the head on April 27 by an Israeli sniper. He succumbed to the wound six days later, bringing the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers during the Great March of Return protests to 45.
In his book Overcoming Zionism, of 2007, the late Joel Kovel expressed the belief that the creation of Israel in 1948, as a colony of settlers who established an exclusively Jewish and discriminatory state, caused a multi-faceted disaster -– “a dreadful mistake” -– that should be undone, with Israel de-Zionized and integrated into the Middle East. A review by Michael Smith.
The latest distorted ‘NY Times’ article on the Gaza focuses on Palestinian blazing kites instead of deadly Israeli snipers.
At least 70 Palestinians were injured by Israeli live fire Friday, the lowest casualty toll since the protests began at the Gaza fence five weeks ago. Medics also treated 1,073 people, for tear gas inhalation, the Gaza health ministry said, but it was the first day no Palestinian was killed by Israeli sniper fire.
When Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa published a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer urging the Philadelphia Orchestra to cancel a trip to Israel because the country is slaughtering unarmed protesters in Gaza, Jewish leaders in the city flew into action, demanding that the paper publish a rebuttal and that editors take a training against BDS. The Israel lobby in action.
Children living in the Gaza Strip are experiencing unusually high rates of nightmares and are showing increasing signs of psychosocial deterioration as a result of the violent response to the Gaza protests. 60 percent of Palestinian children surveyed by Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) were suffering from traumatic nightmares, up from 56 percent a month before.